Twitter

I've been on twitter the last couple of weeks and now have a following of around 1300 people.

At first it was pretty easy, when I had a following of only 20 or 30 people, but as my friends and followers grew it got to be a bit daunting. Here are my tips so far:

1. If you start following a lot of people you will need to get a twitter management tool. There are many out there, but I'm using TweetDeck. It allows you to separate your friends (The people you are following) into groups. That way you can read the most important tweets first, and then get to the rest when you get around to it. It's not perfect, but without it I definitely would not be able to read the posts.

2. Find someone you like or that has a synergistic business with yours and watch what they say for a day or two. If you like them, start following people that they follow. Don't go crazy, you'll want to keep your follower to friend ratio on the lower side. Maybe 2:1. Its ok to follow more people than follow you, but you can't say for instance follow 2000 people and only have 1 follower.

3. When someone follows you, follow them back for at least a few days to see what they have to say. It's the polite thing to do. Of course, if they are just trying to sell you something, you can always unfollow them.

4. Don't shout. If you are selling something, that's ok, but let people get to know you first. If you read my posts, I hardly ever talk about what I do. Now I don't have zillions of followers yet, because I'm still pretty new. I'm just trying to give you the benefit of my experience.

5. Stay away from the sites that tell you that they can get you XXX followers in one day. Basically they have you follow 100 people or so and those people have to follow you and so on. Most of them wind up unfollowing you right away. You'd be better off following people that you think might be interested in what you are doing, than random people you know nothing about.

6. Remember, once you follow 2000 people, twitter limits you on how many more you can follow. They go by a secret ratio formula and I'll let you know what it is once I find out!

Well, that's it for now. You can follow me at @kathekline on Twitter.

What do you think about Twitter?

How to Get Money for your business

Les just posted a new article to the website that you might want to read. It gives information on Angel Investors and free programs to help you get money for your company:

http://www.californiabusinessresource.com/Raising_Money.html

Good luck!